Guarani

Last Updated: 2020-06-29

Background

Language Family: Tupi / Tupi-Guarani / Guarani (I)

• Where there are differences along the Guarani dialect continuum, Paraguayan Guarani will be preferred.
• Guarani is spoken in South America, specifically in Paraguay and in parts of Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil.

Phonology

Consonants

• In nasal syllables, the prenasalized stops assimilate to become fully nasal. Taps and approximants similarly nasalize in nasal syllables (Walker 1999, 68).
  • Gregores, Emma and Suárez, Jorge A. (1967) records the nasals as the underlying forms of the phonemes.
• /x/ exists in free variation with /h/ (Walker 1999, 68); all the sources I have seen, except Fernández, Manuel Fabio and Palacios, Carlos Amadeo Garayo (n.d.), prefer /x/ as the underlying form.
• (“Paraguayan Guarani Phoneme Inventory,” n.d.) records /ɣ/ instead of /ɰ/. Gregores, Emma and Suárez, Jorge A. (1967) use the character for ɣ, but labels it a sonorant, indicating that they too are referring to the velar approximant.
• Sources differ on whether /t/ and /ⁿd/ are dental or alveolar. For now, I have stuck with alveolar for simplicity.
• The labiovelars seem to only emerge when followed by ⟨u⟩, and their attestation is inconsistent, so I am treating them as allophones of the velar sounds and excluding them from the ruleset.

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Velar	Labiovelar	Glottal
Stops	p ᵐb	t ⁿd		k ᵑɡ	kʷ ᵑɡʷ	ʔ
Affricates			dʒ
Fricatives		s	ʃ	x
Flaps		ɾ
Approximants	ʋ	l		ɰ
Note: Phonemes to the left of each cell are voiceless and phonemes to the right of each cell are voiced/prenasalized.

Vowels

• All of these vowels have both an oral and a nasal version; nasalization is only phonemic in stressed syllables (Walker 1999, 69). Nasal vowels, although contrastive in stressed syllables are marked orthographically (see Alphabet below). Therefore, it isn’t necessary to explicitly account for stress, which we have chosen not to do throughout this project. Stress, like several other languages, is denoted by accented vowels, but based on our objectives, accented vowels will be transcribed to their plain counterparts.
• Although /ɯ/ is a minority view in the sources I have seen, with /ɨ/ appearing more commonly, I have preferred /ɯ/ because Walker provided a chart of vowel realizations that shows /ɯ/ to be backed nearly as far as /u/ (Walker 1999, 69).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i ĩ		ɯ ɯ̃ u ũ
Mid	e ẽ		o õ
Low		a ã
Note: The vowels on the left of each cell are oral, and the vowels on the right of each cell are nasal. The two high back vowels on the left are unrounded (oral and nasal) and the two on the right are rounded (oral and nasal).

Alphabet

• The character ⟨g̃⟩ is sometimes used to represent the nasalized velar approximant, but its use is controversial and not consistent, so in my ruleset I will be treating ⟨g̃⟩ as if it were simply ⟨g⟩.
• The digraph ⟨nt⟩ is listed as a consonant pronounced /ⁿt/, but that sound rarely occurs and does not seem to be phonemic. However, Gregores, Emma and Suárez, Jorge A. (1967) argue that prenasalized voiceless stops, including ⟨nt⟩, occur before specific vowels (p. 84).
• Similarly to the above point, ⟨m⟩, ⟨n⟩ and ⟨ñ⟩ are listed as consonants, even though nasals only exist as allophones of prenasalized voiced stops (or affricates, in the case of ⟨ñ⟩). For this reason, my ruleset converts each character’s phoneme to the appropriate underlying form.
• Prior to 1950, Guarani used a different orthographic system (Fernández, Manuel Fabio and Palacios, Carlos Amadeo Garayo, n.d., 4–5). Because the grapheme ⟨y⟩ represents a different phoneme in each Guarani orthography (/dʒ/ in the old orthography vs. /ɯ/ in the current one), it is impossible to represent both systems in a single ruleset, so I have opted only to include the current orthography.
• Stress is denoted by accented vowels; however, we do not account for stress, so accented vowels are transcribed to their plain counterparts.

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
ã	/ã/
e	/e/
ẽ	/ẽ/
g; g̃	/ɰ/
h	/x/
i	/i/
ĩ	/ĩ/
j; ñ	/dʒ/	there are several common realizations of this grapheme, but most scholars appear to prefer /dʒ/
k	/k/
l	/l/	predominantly, if not exclusively, in loanwords
o	/o/
õ	/õ/
p	/p/
r	/ɾ/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
ũ	/ũ/
v	/ʋ/
y	/ɯ/
ỹ	/ɯ̃/
’	/ʔ/
Multigraph
ch	/ʃ/
mb	/ᵐb/
nd	/ⁿd/
ng	/ᵑɡ/
rr	/r/	only in loanwords
ngu	/ᵑɡʷ/

Syllable structure

• The syllable structure is principally (C)V, although prenasalized stops are able to occur as a syllable coda (Gregores, Emma and Suárez, Jorge A. 1967, 61).

Lenition Rules

• The free variation between [x] and [h] may indicate a lenition process in progress (Walker 1999, 68).

Misc. Rules

• Nasal harmony: when a stressed syllable has a nasal vowel, nasalization spreads to voiced segments in both directions; it is only blocked by a stressed syllable containing an oral vowel (Walker 1999, 69).

References

Fernández, Manuel Fabio, and Palacios, Carlos Amadeo Garayo. n.d. “Guarani Renda.” http://www.datamex.com.py/guarani/index.html.

Gregores, Emma, and Suárez, Jorge A. 1967. A Description of Colloquial Guaraní. Mouton & Co.

“Paraguayan Guarani Phoneme Inventory.” n.d. http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~saphon/en/inv/GuaraniP.html.

Walker, Rachel. 1999. “Guaraní Voiceless Stops in Oral versus Nasal Contexts: An Acoustical Study.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 29: 63–94.